The PRP core group will now review the submitted questions to assure they meet the criteria by Sutherland et al. (2011) outlined at the beginning of the project, discard questions that do not meet the criteria, merge similar questions, and if necessary, reword questions with grammatical errors or other language issues. This will set the stage for the community ranking set to start in November.

Preliminary statistics from part two (demographics) of the survey show that:

The respondents come from 37 countries

A majority of the respondents (69 %) are men working within academia (68%)

79 % of the respondents have a PhD as their highest academic degree

The respondents have a wide range of areas of primary expertise, the most common being geomorphology (13 % of respondents), ecology, engineering and infrastructure, and climate change (each 8 % of respondents) and the least common being industrial development and impacts (no respondent), land use and community planning (1 respondent), and mapping (1 respondent).

Age distribution and years of experience working with permafrost related issues for respondents are across the full spectrum.

The PRP core group looks forward to getting your input again in the voting process, which is scheduled from November 10 to December 18. Invitations to the voting process will be sent to all who provided their contact email in the survey form, and will also be publicly announced through list-serves such as permalist and cryolist.